Aaron had always had trouble with girls. Not being blessed with enough good looks to make up for his inherent shyness around the ladies, he’d spent most of his life being the “coulda, woulda, shoulda” guy, failing to muster up the courage to ask girls out, or even say hello, watching the good-looking girls go for the other guy instead of him, feeling the female sex must have had it in for him. Even the power and notoriety of reaching the level of Chief Operations Officer aboard a U.N. satellite had earned him little success with women: Yes, occasionally a girl approached him, and his credentials got him a date, even the rare occasion of sex; but they never stayed, it never lasted, it never worked. As a result, he’d developed an odd schizophrenic viewpoint about women, alternating seemingly at random between wanting them, dismissing them, and hating them for ignoring him.
At that particular moment, the want was ascendant as he watched Beverly Deely’s ass swishing back and forth ahead of him. Aaron knew he had a lot to offer a woman… and she was the kind of gorgeous woman to whom he knew he’d willingly offer it all… if he could just get her attention past all the other guys that usually orbited her like bees around a honeypot.
But now, there were no orbiting hunks around her as she paraded down the corridor. Now would be the time, Aaron told himself… if you could do it. Unsure whether he could or not, he at least sped up his pace, closing the distance to her as he tried to imagine what in God’s Earth he could say to open up a conversation…
She took a right around a corner, and Aaron was only six steps behind her. But as he rounded the corner, he saw her disappearing into a lab just beyond. He caught a last glimpse of her incredible profile, before it disappeared behind a rapidly-shuttering door. A riot of emotions washed through him in an instant—God, I was so close!—I can still find her—ah, she wouldn’t have said “yes” to—hell, she wouldn’t have even spoken to me—well, it had been a great show—finally bringing Aaron back down to frustrated, solitary ground.
Aaron slowed. He noted the door had an amber security banner on it, indicating access only to authorized personnel cleared for the project. Of course, that did not exclude the Chief Operations Officer… Aaron was within his authority to walk on in. But to do what? To amble in casually, ask a few random questions, try to look non-chalant, then get Beverly into a corner and surreptitiously ask her out with half the staff watching? No way in Hell—
And as this ran through his mind, the lab door started to open again. Aaron, suddenly desperate to avoid looking like he’d been following a piece of tail and about to walk into the lab looking for a date, recovered by picking his pace back up and shifting a few degrees… when he suddenly realized that Dr. Silver was walking out of the lab. She saw him almost immediately, probably before he’d managed to recover and attempt to hide his steps… but if she did, she said nothing about it.
Instead, Aaron allowed the frustration of his lost potential conquest to bolster his pride and spike his authority, and spoke first. “Doctor: I was looking for you,” he snapped quickly. “I just came from a meeting with the Ceo and the President of the United States, and Ceo Lenz wasn’t happy that my Science Director wasn’t there! Now what was so important that you couldn’t get out of it for that meeting?”
“I’m sorry, Coo,” Dr. Silver responded without hesitation. “We were reprogramming the Manche probe, and I was already inside the clean room when you called. By that time it was too late to seal the probe back up, they were too far into the job… we couldn’t open the clean room before that, or we’d have to replace half the optronics from contamination. That would have been millions in lost equipment. So I was stuck until they were done.”
Although Aaron was noticeably upset, he could not argue with her explanation. Despite his desire to dominate the situation, he found his domineering energy diffusing; and with an inward sigh, he let it go. “I see,” he said presently. “You did the right thing, of course,” he added needlessly. “No sense ruining valuable equipment, when Dr. Rios could pinch-hit for you. Rios is going to be working with you on a report to Geneva to counter the U.S. proposals. Make yourself available to his needs… we can’t afford to give the U.S. the upper hand on resource negotiations.”
“Understood,” Dr. Silver nodded. “I’ll await him in my office.” Aaron returned her nod, and she quickly turned and proceeded down the corridor to the main office suites.
Aaron watched her go, and suddenly remembered the tail that had led him to her in the first place. He glanced at the door, and didn’t even bother to consider the possibilities of pursuing Beverly Deely. “I’m having a bad enough day, already…”
~
The greenspace just outside of the CnC offices afforded a quiet place for Calvin to pause for a moment. He found an empty bench, in an area of the greenspace with relatively little traffic, and sat down on one end of it, turning his body so it faced away from the rest of the bench and towards a small copse of bushes. He hoped his obvious choice of position would warn off the strangers that his mild celebrity occasionally attracted… right now, he wanted the privacy. He keyed the connection to his home, and waited unhappily for his wife or daughter to answer.
He got Maria, and he was almost sorry he had. He actually would have felt better giving the news to Erin directly, rather than having Maria relay it to her. He was sure Erin would take it better from him. But he had no choice but to push on.
“Hi, Cal,” Maria answered. “How did the meeting go?”
“Not well,” Calvin replied. “I’ve been roped into a job I can’t get out of. Let Erin know, I have to cancel the camping trip. Tell her I’m so sorry.”
To her credit, Maria’s face fell. “Oh, she’ll be so upset.” No pretense that the cancellation bothered her personally… they all knew they were beyond that. But at least she still had some sympathy for Erin’s enjoyment of the parks.
“I know,” Calvin said. “Believe me, if there was any way I could get out of this, I would. But the situation between the sats and Earth is bad. Very bad. I need to work up a report that will keep us from getting inundated with planetary refugees, by morning.”
“Even I have to admit, that’s more than a good reason to cancel a camping trip,” Maria said wryly. “I’ll try to break it to her gently. Will you be home soon?”
“I have to go to the science sections first,” Calvin replied. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. But I’ll try to be back soon.”
“All right. See you then.” She closed the connection, leaving Calvin alone on the bench. He could picture the scene at home: Maria “breaking the news gently” to Erin; Erin either pitching a fit, or just openly sulking about the situation; Maria eventually managing to say something insensitive, about the parks essentially not being anything to miss; and… the fireworks. Ever since Maria had essentially gone incurably romantic on Earth’s rapidly-vanishing natural resources, and subsequently turned on the satellites’ idea of nature, she had become almost a pain to take on the camping trips. She spent so much time comparing this to something on Earth, or that to some famous, now-probably-vanished Terran landmark, and everything on Verdant was found wanting.
They had been forced to leave their home in eastern Maryland on the Delaware Penninsula, when the levees began failing more and more often, and the rising waters made it all but impossible to travel in the region without a pilot’s license… or a raft. Already, so much had been lost on the ground, so much of civilization that had been crowded up against the coastal areas had been flooded and irrevocably lost to sea level rise. He had not wanted his wife and daughter to have to endure the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground, and considered the opportunity to move to Verdant a godsend. Calvin counted themselves lucky they had been able to emigrate at all, in large part thanks to his position in the media at the time; so many other families had not been able to make the trip, and were forced to get used to living on permanently-flooded land.
But at times like this, he almost wished they had stayed on Earth and moved into
a houseboat.
Eventually, he pulled himself up and started for the main science floor. It was actually the same floor that CnC was on, floor 1, but it required a short tram ride, as the cylinder for that floor did not extend all the way from the north to the south ends of Verdant. Like most of the cylindrical floors of Verdant, there were one or two gaps in its length, which provided for a more open layout in the satellite, a largely psychological feature that made life in the huge enclosed space bearable. The part of Floor 1 that included CnC and other administrative offices was connected to the north end of the satellite. The main science sections were in a cylinder that spanned the center of the length of the satellite. Then another gap separated that from the main manufacturing floors, connected to the south end of Verdant.
Calvin caught a tram at a nearby terminal, and settled in for the ride. The trams that ran across the cylinder breaks did so in sealed tubes, the top half of which was open, so passengers could see the view above the trams. Calvin glanced upward, but at Floor 1, there was not much to see: The central shaft, Floor 0, was almost immediately above them, and quite effectively eclipsed the rest of the satellite’s interior by taking up about two-thirds of the view. Only a few floors down, and the view from the trams became spectacular: You could see up through the open cylinder floors, all the way to Floor 20, on the opposite side of the satellite’s outer cylinder; and there was no more impressive sight in a satellite than looking “up there at the ground,” as the songwriter Toni Clear had famously described it.
A few people were on the tram, maybe fewer than usual for that time of day… despite the ability of most satellite residents to do their work in their homes or other preferred locations, people still found themselves out and about during the day, running errands, meeting colleagues, and making plans. Calvin noticed a young girl in a group of girls who was staring at him, and when he looked up, she smiled, stood up and approached him. “Dr. Rios?”
“That’s me,” Calvin smiled amiably, trying not to look as distracted as he was. The girl turned out to be a fan of his science program, Universe 3, and as her friends watched from across the tram, she began to gush, not too embarrassingly, about the enjoyment she got out of the class as a child. And something else was in her eye as well: Being handsome and in good trim, Mediterranean Euro-model looks (despite his Spanish surname, his family was largely from the Swiss highlands), and a distinguished mix of salt-and-pepper hair, Calvin had the kind of looks that went over well in the media, presenting a distinct air of intelligence and authority, plus an attractiveness and approachability that encouraged people to watch him; and he could tell this girl, now in her late-teens, was at that stage where she was taking more notice of men in general, and gauging them sexually. He guessed he was gauging well.
She quickly produced her clipbook and brought up a page, which he noticed was filled with signatures of all kinds of people, a few of which he actually recognized (he assumed the signatures he did not recognize were of popular singers or actors she had managed to meet… kids never change, he reflected). He took her stylus and dashed off what had been his program’s signature closer—“We can’t possibly imagine!”—followed by his personal signature. The girl thanked him profusely, and backed off respectfully, then hurried back among her friends and proudly showed off her newly-collected autograph.
Another passenger, a woman who was close enough to listen to the exchange between Calvin and the girl, watched with Calvin as the girl strutted with her friends, until they all left at the next stop. Then, once the tram had started moving again, she turned to Calvin and said, “Dr. Rios, do you think Earth is going to be all right?”
Calvin looked at the woman, and his smile faded a bit, but he made it a point to put on an air of hope for her. “I sure hope so,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know what we’d do without her.”
~
The main science complex filled the space from Floor 1 to the center, right up to the supply lines of the non-rotating Floor 0. Much of the research and development carried on in the science section was done in counter-rotating drums that resided just above the office floors, designed to take full advantage of the microgravity afforded them by being in orbit to study and create things that were difficult or impossible to do on Earth. Experiments in new materials and compounds, methods of fabrication, and analysis of the effect of microgravity on otherwise-well-known materials, were carried out here.
It had been the first orbital research and manufacturing facilities, launched in the early-twenty-first century, which had cracked the fabrication problems of the most useful fullerene processes, perfected the migraponic growth system, and created a more efficient architecture for electronics. For decades, various products and manufacturing processes optimized for microgravity and hard vacuum were carried out in the orbital facilities, while more data was collected on long-term human habitation in space, specifically, long-term effects of microgravity and various proportions of 0- to 1-gee environments on human and other organisms. Their initial designs, and some trial and error, eventually led to the layouts used in the science and manufacturing sections of Floors 0 and 1. Although a few of the old orbital facilities were still in use, most of them, including the original Seven Heavens Conglomerate facility from the twenty-first century, were now maintained as orbital training facilities, or carried on much more specialized work.
Calvin navigated the curved floors of the complex, the curve being much more pronounced here than they were at lower floors, until he reached the executive offices of the science section, and had no trouble finding Dr. Silver’s office suites. As he approached, he reflected on the fact that this was actually his first visit to Dr. Silver’s actual office, having always spoken to her at some function elsewhere. He entered a small anteroom with comfortable chairs along each wall to the left and right, and a single door on the opposite side of the room, with a simple plaque that read: “Science Director.”
An artificial voice emanated from the air above the room as Calvin entered: “Good morning, sir. May we help you?”
“Dr. Calvin Rios,” Calvin stated, “to see Dr. Silver.”
“Of course, Dr. Silver is expecting you. Please go in.”
The door clicked and slid open a few centimeters. Calvin stepped forward, took the handle and slid the door open the rest of the way. It opened into a comfortable office, lightly decorated in up-to-date carbons and glass, and with a group of large potted plants on the side of the room to Calvin’s left. The wall opposite the door was dominated by a 3-D display column that was empty at the moment. The right side of the room held an executive workstation, and seated behind it, Dr. Jacqueline Silver, who was already standing up at Calvin’s approach.
Dr. Silver was just a few years older than Calvin, with strong but attractive Native American features, a good figure and dark but lovely eyes. Her dark hair was mostly straight and pulled back into a bun, but she allowed some of it to spill over her forehead in attractive bangs. The two of them had been introduced soon after he’d arrived on Verdant, and not long thereafter, Ceo Lenz had asked him to be the satellite’s Science Advisor, a position that would occasionally bring them together professionally. Maria had instantly become suspicious, and possibly threatened by this powerful and attractive woman whom she suspected had orchestrated the position. But as it turned out, the two of them hardly interacted, other than through intermediaries, or at brief meetings, public lunches and dinners (which, considering Maria, was probably just as well). Dr. Silver largely administrated and did practical work, and Calvin acted in a more advisory, “theoretic” capacity with the CnC.
But despite their professional similarities, the fact was that she was far and above Calvin’s superior in science—she had dual PhDs in practical and theoretical physics, while his specialty was actually mathematics—and they both knew it. That unevenness had made some of their past meetings awkward, and Calvin never felt truly at-ease around her.
“Hello, Dr. Rios,” she said casually, of
fering a hand that was noticeably darker in skin tone than his own. “Aaron told me to expect you. How are you?”
“Okay,” Calvin replied, shaking her hand. “And you? Keeping busy, I understand.”
“Of course,” she replied, then did a double-take. “Oh: You mean today.” She smiled wryly, and indicated a chair by the desk. As Calvin sat down, she leaned against the front of her desk, close to the chair. “Yes, there’s nothing like being stuck in a sealed room and having to tell your boss you can’t come when the President comes calling. I’m sure I won’t hear the end of that for awhile.”
“What were you in the middle of?”
Dr. Silver inclined her eyes skyward and arched her eyebrows sadly. “I was standing in a probe clean-room during a tear-down and reprogramming process that couldn’t be rushed or halted, when they called me. It’s my own fault, really… I hadn’t realized before I went in that the reprogramming would take as long as it had… and the initial job was to be three hours long. Thank God I’d been to the bathroom first!” Calvin chuckled appropriately, though it seemed to him her story was deliberately skewed to put him at ease. Dr. Silver shrugged and winced. “Fortunately, they had scheduled a convenient interim point for a break, and sealed the probe up in time for me to get out in somewhat less than three hours. But by then the meeting was already over.”
“Ah. Well, obviously, you know what the meeting was about… I’m sure they sent you details?”
“Of course,” Dr. Silver replied, turning her head and arching backwards over her desk to tap something on her workstation. Calvin casually noted the attractive swell of her chest as she did so. Below the glass surface of the desk, lines of text appeared. “Lambert is trying to force Verdant into accepting some of his tired, poor, huddled masses.”
“Undiplomatic… but well-put,” Calvin replied. “Julian wants me to prepare a counter-report to the data the President sent to the U.N. to support his emigration position. I wanted to start with your office.”
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